The Burning Time
by Aconitum-Napellus
Summary: Spock begins to feel his second pon farr coming upon him, so he returns to Vulcan where he hopes to gain relief.
1. Chapter 1

1.

He has counted the days precisely. No matter that they do not coincide with 'fleet-regulated time intervals. He has counted them anyway, delineating them in his mind just as sure as if he were watching the sun rise and set. He has watched them pass, wondering if his body will, since it has begun in its path, continue following the circadian rhythms of a planet he has given up as a thing of the past.

Glimpses of his home surround him. The thick, dull red of the curtains cradle him. The scent of incense from the firepot starts into his nostrils and curves away. He has special permission to change the sensitivity of the fire sensor in his quarters, else he would be starved of oxygen or showered in rain every time he lit his meditation flame or the billowing of fine ash particles became too thick.

He can feel it coming upon him, creeping day by day. It stalks him like a _le matya_ in the dark. It prowls, touching him at the back of his spine, drifting past the tips of his fingers. He feels it in the heat of his loins, in the restless stirring of his most intimate parts. He counts the days off, and he knows that it is coming.

_I had thought I would be spared this_.

Those words drift past him, a memory from so long ago. A memory from almost precisely seven years ago. _Almost_ precisely, because the rhythms of his own planet do not correspond to earth years.

He moans lightly, like a woman feeling the first tightness of labour, and presses his forehead against those dull red curtains. This place is too close, too tight. The air is recycled, never fresh. He is not sure if he is moaning because of a real pain, or because of the expectation of pain to come. Like a woman in labour, this thing will grow on him. It will press around him and inhabit his body, and finally he will find himself out of control.

He has put off this moment for long enough. This time, when he asks for a leave of absence, there are no delays, no conferences or issues of more importance than the needs of one biological entity. He finds himself home within three days, no questions asked, and just the tight, firm touch of his captain's hand on his shoulder to tell him that he is understood, and that people will worry until he returns.

If he returns…

He stands on the dry sand, grains scudding past the soles of his boots as they are driven by the wind. He has left his uniform behind. There is no place for it here. His boots are a light tan, made for desert wear. They have not been out of their storage place for three years. Neither have the clothes he wears – the loose, thin kaftan of white, the loose, white leggings that cinch tightly about the boots to stop the sand from driving in and rubbing the naked skin of his feet and ankles.

He stands still and sighs lightly. He is aware of the thinness of his lips and the minute lines that trace his skin. He is not even middle aged for one of his people, but there are fine lines about his mouth and eyes, an inheritance of his mother's blood. He tries to smooth concern and apprehension away from his face wherever possible, but those fine lines appear, and he tells himself that it is a symptom of a skin exposed to a ravaging sun, not of a mind exposed to emotion.

Arrangements should be made. There are places he could go. His people are no longer barbarians. They do not allow males of his kind to die in wracking pain. There is a certain logic, perhaps, that drives those who offer relief to his kind. They have their own interpretation of the axiom, _the good of the many_… There is no logic in letting a male die for want of a biological satiation which is such a short flicker in a life span of two hundred years. Such a short, intense flicker, like a solar flare reaching out in desperation from the boiling surface of a star and then dying back, weak and chastened and hopeless.

Arrangements should be made. But he finds himself hesitating. He finds himself indecisive. He finds his hands clenching at his sides and a few wind-driven particles of sand insinuate themselves into the creases of his palms. He would open his hands and examine the worlds he holds, but as soon as his fingers uncurl the grains are drifted away by a renewed breeze.

He tries to visualise the molecular structure of silica, and finds that he can't. He finds that all he can think of is smooth skin and the ripe curve of female thighs and the soft, receptive creases between. He turns toward his mother's house, but he knows in some part of his mind that it is too late for that. He is not going to knock on his parents' door and stand there, his lips slightly parted with need, with the catch of breath in his lungs, and explain to his father that it is his Time and that he needs shelter. He will not sit in his father's study and make clinical arrangements through his father's computer for one of those _as'en'tda,_ those logical and blank-faced women, to come to his aid, to succour him in a closed off room in an annex of some small hospital where the walls are soundproofed and the patients come and go under the cover of night. No. He will not. He does not know what he will do, but he will not do that.

He thinks of those messages that sometimes flicker onto the computer when the ship is near a planet or starbase – those messages that get through all the filters and offer up cheap sex, free sex, drugs for sex and impossible biological enlargements. He should have taken notice of one of those, perhaps. He should have found himself in a dirty room in a forgotten corner of a starbase with a women with no face. Anything but this. He had been a fool to come home.

He turns away from the path home and turns to the desert instead. Out here it is primal. Out here these is nothing but creatures that move to the urges of their own bodies and plants that grow without will. There is no thought, no logic. The oldest traces of civilisation have been worn almost to nothing by sand. The pillars of ancient structures have been scoured to spindles and the ignorant would not discern them from the natural towers of eroded rock.

He walks and he walks. The heat of the sun bears down on him and the sand keeps skimming his clothing, a soft, susurrating sound on the fabric as it brushes and leaves him in its wake. He has a canteen of water, as all desert travellers must, and he takes sips now and then, letting the liquid settle about his tongue and trickle warmly down his throat. This time will be his death, he knows, but still the body does all it can to stay alive. It makes him crave water. It makes him crave woman. It makes him crave a spot of shade to crawl into and to huddle in while the cramps and the fire shudder through his body.

This not even depths of his Time. This is only the fringe. His hands shake only subtly. His spine is still straight. His breathing is still even and almost controlled. His thoughts are still even and almost controlled. That is why he is able to do this. That is why his is able to choose to retain his dignity and retreat to a quiet place, and try to control what cannot be controlled and try to outlive what cannot be lived through.

Somewhere out here, somewhere in this vast blur of blowing sand, there is a structure that has been abandoned for more time than his troubled mind can count. Somewhere there is a well and there are dark corners shaded by stone where the heat of the day is kept a little at bay.

He raises his eyes to the horizon, where mountains rise up like a handful of cracked stones. They are old, as old as the sand that scuds about his feet. This far away they look like shards of gravel, but in reality they are thousands of metres tall and snow lies ancient and still on the highest peaks. He cannot imagine that coolness, standing here on the flat desert plain where the air is dusted red with sand and the sun beats down from above and heat shimmers up from the ground below.

Perhaps night time will ease the heat from his shoulders and arms and leave his head clear. Perhaps it will give some succour to the aching that is setting up in his bones and the burning that is beginning to cloud his eyes. He thinks of women, of towns full of women, of women walking the streets. He thinks of a woman in the closeness of her quarters, dropping her dress from her cool body, showing the curve between hip and ribs, showing the pearl necklace of her vertebrae as she bends to gather up a robe. He sees her hair loosen and drop to brush the smooth skin of her back, sees her turn as she moves toward the shower…

He finds himself on his knees in the sand, his eyes squeezed closed, his hands gripping about a formless clutch of grains. If his wits were about him he would notice the burning of the silica beads against his knees, against his palms. His wits are enough about him to notice abstractedly the feeling of it, the hotter-than-is-safe sting on his flesh, but he is not composed enough to let go or stand up. Not straight away.

It burns in him. He needs to turn back. He needs to crawl, metre by metre, back across the desert to where those women are, to that oasis somewhere out of his sight where there are legs that will part and a softness to sheath himself in.

A moan like that of an animal startles him. There is no animal here but himself. He has put himself far enough away by now that he cannot crawl back. He would not survive. The moan pushes through him again, like a woman in labour. It courses through his cells. He feels it deep through his chest and stomach. He feels the heat in the pit of his belly and the stiffness between his legs. He sees _woman_ like a mirage and he begins to stand and walk again, step after step, barely seeing where he is going.

It has come on him like a flood tide this time. He hadn't realised it would come so soon, so fast. His body is a mess of pain, a knot of cramp. His mind is losing hold on anything that he used to call logic. He sips at his water only from habit. His clothes are thick with dust and his eyes are half closed and he stumbles again and finds himself thinking, _please, please_…


	2. Chapter 2

2.

He finds himself lying on the solidity of stone. He doesn't know how he got there. Later he discovers that the knees of his leggings are ragged and almost worn through, his fingernails chipped and driven full of dust. He has crawled, obviously. He blinks his eyes slowly, feeling dried out tears crack, and he passes his hand over the flat flagstone beneath him. There is shade above his back but his feet are still in the burning heat. His leggings have protected him, but beneath the fabric the flesh of his lower legs feels solid with heat, as if he were half-cooked.

He shuffles forward a little, pulling himself by his hands deeper into the shade. There is a coolness here, such as it is. His lips are dry and his canteen is still tethered to his side, but when he fumbles to open the lid he splashes and spills water on the stone he lies on. He watches it bloom out like ink on blotting paper and then evaporate soundlessly into the air.

Somehow he gets some of it between his lips, and it seems to be soaked up instantly by the parched tissues of his mouth. It never reaches his throat.

He blinks again and looks around, dazzled and blinded by the streaks of sunlight and shade about where he lies. Against all probability he has reached the ruin he sought and dragged himself as well into the shade as he could manage. Against all probability he has slept for a time, and the sun has crept some degrees across the bronze of the sky. In time night will fall and the cold will begin to seep into his bones and he will find himself shivering and regretful of his thin desert clothes.

Somewhere he can hear the movement of water. Somewhere in his mind his thoughts are a tangle of red, a tangle of need and guilt and self-loathing. A small part of him reminds him that all his kind must suffer this. A small part of him reminds him that biology cannot be denied. But still the self-loathing grows and intertwines with the pulsating need and his body comes to seem a useless carcass, worse than creature.

He drags himself again. He begins to recognise the light and shade around him, to orient himself in this most ancient of ruins. He sees an abandoned meditation chamber over there, the wide open space of the refectory before him with its stone table broken in two by the work of heat followed by cold followed by heat over the vastness of time. He sees broken walls that signify hallways and other chambers, and places where some kind of roof still covers over those places of refuge. And in the centre he keeps hearing that movement of water, and he can smell the growth of vegetation nearby. This is his oasis. There are no women here, but there is water and botanical life. Not everything he needs for life right now, but two thirds of that which is necessary.

He is crawling and then kneeling beside that running water, his chest resting hard on the curved edge of the low wall about the pool, his hands hanging limply into the liquid. He is raising his fingers to his mouth and sucking the water from them like a calf learning to drink. His throat is wet and he feels the moisture enter his stomach and it feels like a reprieve from the cruellest of governors. He wants to crawl into the water but he is afraid that he will drown, so he contents himself with lying there, the stone wall pressing against his breathing chest and his arms deep in the water, his skin aching with relief and the sleeves of his kaftan wicking the moisture up and up and letting the heat evaporate slowly into the air.

He thinks he will try to speak. He opens his mouth and forms a word, but nothing comes but a cracked noise like a carrion bird hovering over a carcass. He closes his eyes and feels his hair dipping into the water in front of him, and he lowers his forehead until the cool touches his skin and his tongue laps at the water like a dog. In time the tremors ease a little. In time he can make a noise less like an inarticulate bird and he can pull himself up until he is sitting against the wall and he can scoop water in his hands and bathe himself as if performing his own baptism. His body still cramps and aches with need. The pit of his stomach is still hot with it. He is still tight and burning between his legs as his body yearns toward something he cannot have.

He looks around with eyes that are still crusted and dim and he sees the shifting pattern of leaf shadows, and he looks up and finds vines and low trees bearing fruit that are swollen like women about to give birth. He picks one. He fumbles and drops it and it rolls on the thin layer of blown sand. He anoints it with water and then bites into it, and the taste explodes in his mouth with an intensity that is almost too much to bear. Seeds pop and ejaculate stronger taste through the tissues of his mouth and he eats like a carnivore, his tongue seeking to lap every trace of juice from about his lips, his teeth heedless of the splitting and cracking of the hard seed shells at every bite. Suddenly his stomach is growling like a beast itself, and he is glad of the intensity of the taste and the bounty of the fruit he has discovered. He does not want to die. He wants to cling to life with his bent fingers and push through the pain that wracks every cell of his body.

It is almost too much. Exhaustion runs through him and leaves him spent on the ground. The stalk of the fruit is loose in his fingers and he drops it on the sand-scudded flagstones and watches grains adhere to the spittle-dampened remnants of the fruit as the wind blows. He needs to find somewhere better to shelter, somewhere that the wind will not steal the moisture from his body and where the sun will not burn him and the night cold will not bother him too far.

He is standing, aching, looking around at the ruins that surround him. He has the presence of mind to refill his canteen, to pick a handful of clustered and swollen fruit from a low hanging bough. He walks stiffly, like a man who has ridden a horse all day, the muscles of his thighs aching right up into his buttocks, up into his back. He looks about, the surroundings bleached in his sight by the brightness of the sun. He seeks out the dark places that are blindnesses in his vision – and then he finds a retreat; a half-tumbled room where sand has been blown into a miniature dune and the walls still stand and something of a roof still shades the floor. The sand will be a good enough bed. It will be soft enough for his needs.


	3. Chapter 3

3.

The sand is a pillow beneath him. It moulds to the shape of his ear and his cheek. Under his hip and shoulder it feels hard and unyielding, but under his face it is soft.

He is curled now, his canteen held at the centre of his body, his arms and legs crooked up around it as if he were holding a newborn child. The fruit holds no interest for him, but he knows that he must remember the water. He must drink, and drink, and drink, to stop his body from being turned into leather by the heat and the wind. Here in the shelter the wind has trouble reaching him and the heat is less direct, but still a being will die out here if he does not keep his wits about him.

He should be trying to meditate. He will die anyway if he cannot control the spasming of his muscles and the surging releases of hormones that are invading his veins. The probability – No. The probability escapes him. It is too complex to calculate the variables of age and need and his hybrid genetic makeup, and to factor in outside conditions such as weather and surroundings and nutritional input. The probability doesn't matter. He will either live or die. That is all.

He pulls himself up onto his haunches and the aching sighs through him. He pulls his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms about them and opens his eyes and stares at the square of light where once a door sat in a frame. The light is growing less intense. The colours out there are sinking into deeper reds and violets and flaming golds as the sun lowers itself in the sky. He can see the desert stretching away for miles in that rectangle of the doorway. He can see the ripples that have been formed by the wind. He can see, far away, those jagged tooth-edges of mountains and the snow on them seeming to glow as the dying sun strikes them. He sees a beauty that he does not usually let himself appreciate, and it feels like an aching in his heart.

He wonders of himself, _Am I mad yet?_ He thinks not. It is so hard to tell. Is he mad because he is thinking of beauty and it is bringing tears to his eyes, or is he simply sane?

He needs to focus. He needs to regulate his ragged heartbeat and try to suppress the ejaculation of hormones into his bloodstream. He lifts his hands into a praying position, steeples his fingers into a pinnacle to focus upon. His hands tremble and slip apart. He lifts and positions them again, but it is no use. Unless he clenches his fists he cannot keep them steady, and if he clenches his fists he expends so much energy on keeping them that way that he cannot think.

He lets his hands drop to his side like dead fish, lets them lie and tremble of their own accord on the sand. He focuses on the path of the sun instead, which is dipping now so that it is just visible below the top of the doorway.

But it will not come. It will not come. He watches the sun and pretends it is his meditation flame, but it is not. It tracks slowly across the sky. There is no flicker, but just that slow, relentless movement. He tries and tries to focus, but that slow movement makes his eyes track sideways and he cannot keep his mind steady.

He is hot, he is cold. He shivers as if he is wracked with ague. He grits his teeth together and moans slowly, an animal in pain. He sees the form of a woman before him and he can no longer resist. He loosens the drawstring waist of his leggings and reaches his hand inside, and heat meets him, hard like a baton, aching and needful. He closes his fingers and moves his hand up and down, up again. He strokes and caresses himself and tries to pretend that the hand is not his own, that his fingers feel cool to the burning flesh because they are not his own. His mind trembles and blanks. He closes his eyes and sees a woman, always veiled, her face always obscured. Her body close, her curves soft through the haze. She flickers, sometimes there, sometimes not, as he becomes lost in the giddy relief as his hand moves upon himself. At last he moans, a moan of fleeting satiety this time, and slumps back against the wall, his hand wet and his leggings sullied.

How has he been brought to this?

Through half closed eyes he watches the sun and the dark slice of stone that makes the roof above him. Better this way. Better than lying in some sterile room, lost in madness, a stone faced goddess kneeling before him and holding every power over him. Better than the drugs to suppress telepathic joining and the drugs to weaken his muscles so he cannot harm in the heat of lust. Better than rutting like an animal with a stranger.

He pushes his one clean hand against his mouth, hard in a fist against the softness of his lips. His bruises his own flesh against his teeth. He bites his lip into his mouth and tastes blood. It is curiously good. He recalls that traditionally at this time whole carcasses are roast and men celebrate. That was before the reformation, of course. That was when this was a time of virility, not of shame. He is shamed now as he fantasises tearing half-raw meat off the bone and swallowing it into his body. Soon he will feel too sick to eat. It would be logical – yes, logical – to sate himself now on the flesh of some creature, to give himself strength for what is to come.

But that will not come. The memory of that fact comes over him like a bereavement. There is no woman, soft of curves and open to his need. There is nothing but desert and stone and blowing sand, and at the centre this little oasis of shelter. There is nothing to save him but the strength of his mind and his body. He needs to meditate but he is hot. His skin flushes with heat and he can feel his heartbeat in every part of his body. His clothes are soiled in more way than one, damp and driven hard with dust.

He is outside in the dying light of the day, dropping his clothes to the ground. The heat is still welling up from the sand but the air is starting to cool now. The spring at the centre of the ruin is still murmuring with liquid sound. He stands naked in the low sunlight and looks down at his body, at his tired limbs and taut abdomen, at his genitals that are soft but aching with need between his legs, at the hair that is matted on his thighs.

He walks into the pool about the spring with his eyes almost closed, feeling the soft chill of the water creeping up his body. He kneels and sinks his hot body into that cold embrace and the water surrounds him totally, leeching heat away from his skin. His head is underwater and his eyes are still half open, seeing the swirling of silt and the light cutting through at an oblique angle, turning the water the colour of honey. He keeps his mouth closed and his lungs still and forgets about breathing, but lies like a corpse beneath the water, his arms and legs limp and shedding heat.

Finally he surfaces. His head breaks the water and it streams from his hair and down his body. The air is truly cold now and he starts to shiver. He looks up and sees a blackening sky and the pin pricks of stars, hardly shimmering through the rarefied, dry air.

Perhaps now he can meditate. It is cold but the heat is surging back from the core of his body, creeping out through his capillaries, pulsing into his fingertips. He redons the kaftan but leaves the leggings, then settles back in his shelter and steeples his fingers. For now his hands are steady and he stares at the silhouette of his fingertips and starts to focus his thoughts.


	4. Chapter 4

4.

He is sitting still, his hands steepled still, his eyes still trying to focus on the tips of his fingers. It is almost completely dark and he can barely see anything. He tries to keep his breathing regular. In, out, in, out. He tries to relax each muscle from toes to neck. He tries to think of logic and duty and to push away the animal need. He can feel a slight lessening of that feeling within him – that feeling that he is wound tight and about to snap, the feeling that somewhere something is shrilling so high-pitched a noise that he cannot hear it, that feeling that his body is going to split apart with an aching that can barely be described.

He is so tired. Ordinarily tiredness would be pushed away, but it is hard to fight everything at once. The air around him is growing colder, the wind turning back the other way and bringing drafts down from the far mountains. The sound of the sand hitting stone is ceaseless, like the claws of a million insects catching on slate. The sand drifts over his bare feet until his toes become buried, but he does not flinch to shake the sand off because more will always come.

His shoulders ache, and finally his hands fall back to his sides. His fingers are numb and the blood begins to rush back into them now that they are turned down toward the ground. His flesh tingles and he flexes stiffly, rubbing sand that he cannot see beneath his fingertips until his hands have come back to life.

His head is a tight drum of aching. Each beat of his heart pushes blood through his temples. His lips feel stiff and full. His eyes are crusted half closed. He sinks back onto the sand, only having the presence of mind to wrap the loose neck fabric of his kaftan up over his mouth and nose before he falls into some kind of sleep.

In the depths his mind uncurls. He can feel the cold of night at the edges of his consciousness, but everything else is heat. His blood is running like snakes. His bones are long and malleable. His arms move about a woman who is not there, stroking her flesh and exploring her by no more than touch. His lips are sinking over hers, over her ear and neck. His mouth is on her breast and his hands are seeking between her legs and he feels her receptive dampness. He rises onto all fours like a dog in heat. He is crouching over her, driving into her, and he is woken by his own cry to realise that he is alone, lying in sand, the fabric no longer over his mouth and his body jerking in climax.

_Alone…_

He huddles tightly around himself, his hand pushing into the sand and trying to find some warmth down there that has lingered from the day. He is alone. He cannot control this. He will die alone, in madness.

He tries to sleep again. He has to sleep. He is thinned out with tiredness. He feels like nothing but bone and hot skin. He lays one hand beneath his head and closes his eyes and tries to stop a noise of despair from escaping his mouth. He drifts away again, his mind flickering into a dream place where cool hands stroke his body and he reads the contours of a woman with his fingertips. He strokes his fingers down her cheekbones and he drowns in the depths of her eyes. He twines her hair about his hands and his mouth nuzzles her like a creature seeking food. In his dream he remembers another dream, long ago, and he searches about himself, trying to grasp at that figure who has suddenly become elusive and unreal. He doesn't know which way to turn.


	5. Chapter 5

5.

He wakes to the sound of sand again, and the sharp and sudden cracks of this desert stone warming after the cold night. He lies without fear in his shelter. The cracks are microscopic and have been occurring for millennia and the probability of a rock collapsing upon him is so low as to be negligible.

A sudden and formless memory comes to him and he has a feeling inside his chest like he is falling. _This_ is fear. He knows that. This is the realisation that he is alone and he is not in control, and that soon he must die. There should be no fear attached to death, but he finds in his mentally fragile state that there is. This, then, is what all humans must feel at the end of their lives.

He lies still with his eyes closed, not daring to look at see the reality of his solitude. On Earth, he knows, in the ancestral lands of that side of his heritage, the dead were laid to rest in structures such as this – the upright slabs of stone as walls and the horizontal slabs of stone over the top making a tomb that would outlast the centuries.

He is not ready to die. He is foolish and alone and he does not want to die because of pride masked behind logic, because of all the ancient thoughts so intermingled with the modern ones that he could not think without one silently influencing the other.

There is another noise beyond the scattering sand and the tiny _ping_ of rock expanding. It is a soft warble, tonal but without the structure and intelligence of proper music. It moves closer to his head and then further away again – and suddenly he is aware that he is _not_ alone. In the briefest of seconds he has a shivering realisation of his body, that he is lying here with his kaftan bunched up above his waist and the neck folds about his mouth and nose still, his legs lying loosely apart in the aftermath of sleep and his hands half buried in sand. He can smell perfume, and under that he can smell _woman,_ a scent most humans would be unaware of but which in his hormonal state he cannot ignore.

The awareness prickles through him as the small hairs on his body stand on end.

His eyes open and she says, 'Oh!' in soft surprise.

Her head is tilted down and he can't clearly focus on her face. Her hair is brown and has been held back behind her head, but obviously it has loosened over time and now it hangs about the sides of her face in ragged, dust-filled strands. Her forehead is lined because she is worried, deeply worried.

'Well, I was wondering if you would wake up,' she says in a voice that he knows too well. He is all too familiar with that bright tone she uses to cover over her concern.

He can barely form a question. He doesn't remember how to speak. He tries and tries to suppress the biological insistence rising in him but it is too strong. There is a reason why only male doctors attend the celibate during their Time. He clenches his hands under the sand and _tries_ to control, and all he can do is moan.

There is a sting at his arm and he knows that she has given him drugs of one kind or another. He is relaxed, much more relaxed, than he has been, despite the burning that streaks through the core of his body and the confusion in his mind. His muscles are relaxed, but in his mind an anger surges, uncontrolled and ashamed and fierce.

'Leave me be,' he hisses through teeth clenched hard together.

'I can't,' she says, softly and calmly, as if this is an argument she has rehearsed many times. There is a determination and fatality in her voice that reminds him of these immovable desert rocks. 'I am a doctor – or at least, I will be soon.'

He blinks and tries to remember. She has been absent from the ship for a year now at the least. He can't remember the exact amount of time, although he should. He remembers that she had accumulated a certain amount of accreditations under the doctor but that she could not obtain all the necessary experience on board. So she left. He remembers watching a shuttle leaving the ship, dwindling smaller and smaller, a tiny point of white that soon became indistinguishable from the stars. He remembers watching it and not knowing what to think.

'Leave me be,' he says again. It is all he can think of to say.

'No,' she replies.

Silence falls. He lies still, trying to keep control of his body. He wonders if he should care about his state of nudity, but he can't find it in himself to do anything about it. A wave of need rushes through him and he tries to stifle a moan. He cannot bear to be seen in this indignity. None of his own people would have the temerity to force their care on him at a time like this.

Finally he tries again, tries to be rational, to explain.

'You do not understand the risks you are exposing yourself to,' he says.

'I understand,' she says.

Her voice is further away and he realises that she is not next to him. Perhaps she is outside in the fullness of the midday sun. But he can smell her still. Woman. Human sweat. Traces of perfume. Pheromones that she does not know she is releasing on the wind. He needs. He _needs_. He is on his knees and crawling, his eyes tight closed, trying to make himself stay but crawling forward all the while to the scent of her.

'What did you come here to do?' he asks, his jaw almost rigid with the effort to speak, to control the need that is ballooning through him.

She turns to him then and he sees her, the sun striking her full in the face, her light clothes shaped to the contours of her body by the blowing of the wind. Her lips half parted, her nipples points of stiffness beneath her thin top. She has redressed her hair and it is dull and captured tight behind her head again, but her eyes are the blue of an acetylene torch.

'Whatever you need me to do,' she says.

The anger and the need flame again inside him. He is so angry that he could smash stone. He wants her so badly that nothing exists but the wanting. More than that. He _needs_ her. He hates her with every cell in his body for being there and driving him to this indignity. He doesn't want to hurt her. He doesn't want to disgust her. He doesn't want to live through this shame.

'You are a whore,' he says.

She slaps him so hard that for a moment he does not know what to do. The instinct, the primal surging directive in his muscles, is to strike back, to slam her into unconsciousness. He holds himself so still that the veins cord in his muscles. He can see nothing but the haze of anger. He doesn't even breathe. Sound escapes him but he is beyond words.

'How _dare_ you?' she asks him.

Still he cannot speak. His mind is whirling, vibrating, a space of white noise between his ears.

'I will not see you die,' she says, her voice a low hiss that grates on his senses. 'I came here to do whatever is necessary to keep you from dying.'

Again he hears the noise of her scanner. Again some chemical enters his bloodstream in a sharp stab like the sting of an insect. His lungs move again and he is aware that breathing is easier than it had been. He had not realised that breathing had become a hard thing to do.

He is so far beyond speaking that he does not know what to do. He rises up onto his knees and reaches out a hand, urgent and wordless. She flinches away momentarily, a look of alarm widening those eyes. But then she steadies herself and comes closer again, her face as still as stone, her eyes hard and glinting in the sun. He raises his hand to her face, and touches.


	6. Chapter 6

6.

She sees it all. The inside of his head is a whirling of confusion, of pain and shame and need all wrestling and trying to obtain dominance. Somewhere a small voice says, _control, control, control_, but the rest of his mind, his animal mind, ignores those foolish words. The inside of his head is incandescent and mute and the need in his body is so strong that it pushes up and takes over all rational thought. His mind can feel only the aching and the lust and the basic knowledge that if he does not mate, he will die. He is a fish driven upstream. He is a dog in heat.

Somewhere there is coolness. Somewhere there is something like water flowing. Her mind is almost nothing against his, but it is there, cool and small and quiet. Her own anger is strong, but it is chill and controlled. There is no lust in her mind. She is not trying to take advantage. There is hurt and anger, and there is the driving need to help, almost as strong as his need to mate.

_This is it_, he realises in an abstract way. _This is what drives men to become healers. The need to help that is stronger than every other desire in his mind._

The worry and the need to ease his suffering is something that fills her mind, that laces through the anger and the hurt, that controls them and pushes them away just as logic usually steadies him. He feels tears with his mind as much as he feels them with his fingers on her face. Her skin is so cold, despite the desert sun. An acceptance passes between them, unspoken and blind, and he lets his hand drop. He lets everything drop and slumps on the sand. He feels cold suddenly, and he lies and lets the heat of the sun push into him, bringing his skin and flesh back to life.

He can hear the warble of the scanner again and he murmurs, 'I am all right.'

'The meld produces changes in blood pressure,' she says, her fingers tentatively touching the side of his neck. 'I think you almost fainted, if a Vulcan can faint, that is.'

'You're studying here,' he realises slowly.

'Yes,' she says. 'I elected to take six months of my training here. I always enjoyed exobiology. That's how I knew you'd come in. And – well, you're not the only one who can keep track of dates, you know.'

She is laughing in a muted way. He stares at her, trying to work out whether to be offended. The sky is arching above her, a light rose deepening to the colour of human blood at the zenith. He can hardly make out her face against the brightness of the sun.

'You walked?' he asks. His voice is no more than a rasp.

She laughs again. 'I'm not that stupid. I have a flitter. But don't worry. I'm not going to haul you out of here. I have the communications equipment to get you an emergency transport if necessary, but I hope it won't be necessary.'

He settles his head back on the sand, feeling the heat of it in his hair. The warmth is coming back to him. The aching and the burning are coming back to him and as he looks at her he knows his pupils are dilating. He knows his skin is tightening, his heart is pumping blood and hormones deep into his body. The stiffening between his legs feels like part of a sickness, not a natural thing.

'I've taken all the necessary precautions,' she tells him, her head turning and seeing his arousal. 'You don't need to worry about that. And you'll find yourself weaker than you should be. You won't hurt me.'

Her hand is moving now, a silhouette against the sun. He blinks stupidly, his mind a haze of hope and fear. He will not initiate. He fights with all of his power to initiate nothing. He will not have it said that he forced himself upon her.

But her fingers touch him, touch that hard, hot, yearning part of him, and it is as if she touches the raw flesh of a wound. He cannot control himself. His back arches upward and his eyes close and he moans through clenched teeth, trying so hard not to thrust but unable to help himself. There is no sound but the sand moving and the moans leaving him and drifting into the arid air. Her fingers clench and do not let go. They work on him, massaging him with resolute firmness. It takes no time at all, pent as he is, and he finds himself shuddering, his mind lost in a climax that is perfect but not quite perfect enough.

He can't think any more. He cannot think. He can smell his seed in the wind and the sand is shifting and scuttering up his bare legs and over his face and he can smell her close to him, live and ready and _woman_. He needs her. His mind is lost. He is on her, his fingers clenched and pawing, tearing at her clothing. She gives a wordless cry of surprise. She had not expected this so soon. She had not expected his lack of control. Her hands are under his, helping him or trying to stop him, trying to get herself undressed enough that he can get to what he needs before he tears her clothes into pieces.

He tries to control. Some part of him tries to control. Some part of him burns with shame for what he has become. But he is losing awareness. He is on top of her. She is lying on the sand and he doesn't even know who it is any more. He is entering her, entering a well of coolness that does nothing but incense his need. The smell of her is rising around him, his hands are tangled in her hair, pulling it loose about her face. His lips are on her skin, on lips or cheeks or neck perhaps, but all he can feel is the feeling of her around him as he thrusts and thrusts again until his need releases itself in climax.

It is a quick joining. He is a bull with a cow in heat, a dog pushing himself on a bitch. He lies upon her afterwards, almost unaware of her presence until his strength recovers and drives him to rut again. She is slick beneath him, beaded with sweat that evaporates into the hot air and is replaced with sweat anew. Her hair is damp around her face, her eyes closed, her mouth a line. This time the urgency is more muted and he touches a hand to the side of her face, feeling the surface of her thoughts through his fingertips. His ability is suppressed somewhat by the drugs she has given him, but she has had the courage to leave him with enough power to gain the mind touch he needs.

He would weep if he could. Even as he moves inside her, he would weep. He can feel the thoughts running inside her, confused and bitten back. There is love there, and fear. She had not expected this roughness, this lack of tenderness, despite her attempts at research. She had not expected to be lying on the sand outside an ancient ruin with this man astride her, using her as a receptacle. She reminds herself that she is saving his life. She reminds herself that she loves him and that she would walk over a bed of glowing embers to help him. She reminds herself bitterly that she had fantasised a softer version of this for a decade.

He steadies himself. There is some kind of sanity creeping back into his mind, like the tide moving imperceptibly up the shore. He begins to become aware of himself, of the muscles of his calves and thighs tight and aching, his back a curve of tiredness, his lips bruised from the biting of his own teeth. He is aware of the dampness of her beneath him and the lost expression on her face and suddenly he loses strength and slips to the sand beside her.

'I am sorry,' he said, brushing the hair from her forehead with a thumb. 'Christine, I am sorry.'

Her eyes are closed, but slowly they open. She does not speak. She simply looks at him, a depth of something unreadable there in the drifting colour of her irides. With the red sky above her the blue has taken on a hint of violet.

'Is that it?' she asks him, and he cannot read her voice.

He can feel the tightening inside him, the cramps in his body, the fire a thin wick at the centre of him. The need is still there, a creature in the dark, a creature waiting until it has the power to rise again.

'No,' he says.

When she exhales he sees that her thin top is adhering to her skin, wet with sweat. It has become almost transparent. Lying like that, naked from the waist down and with her thin clothing painted to her body, he realises that she is a beautiful woman. He had harboured those thoughts before, but now it is like a revelation. He can feel his pupils dilating, feel his muscles shivering and releasing. He has not moved, but he feels closer to her than he ever has before.

Her head is turned sideways, her panting breaths touching his cheek, cooler than the desert air. Her face is flushed, her lips parted. Still he cannot read her expression. He cannot tell if she is sunk in regret, or resigned, or content.

After a long while he stands, the sand sticking to his body in a glistening layer. He strips off the useless kaftan and throws it back into the shelter and stands there naked, letting the sun stroke his aching shoulders and smooth his aching head. He holds out a hand to her and she stands, unabashed, and they walk like Adam and Eve toward the freshwater spring, where they will bathe like those reborn.


	7. Chapter 7

7.

He lies still, half in the shelter and half out. If he were human his legs would be burning in the sun. But he is not human. He has had ample proof of that over the last three, four, maybe five days.

He is spent. He is so tired that his chest barely moves as he breathes. His eyes are half closed and he is glad of the dark shade above him because if he could see the light he thinks his head would split apart.

Illogical. Of course his head would not suffer a physical failure on exposure to sunlight. But he doesn't have the resources to control the pain of headache that is snaking behind his eyes and through his temples.

The word _logic_ settles in his mind like a cold compress on a wound. So peaceful and familiar a word. It is like a spar floating on the sea after a shipwreck, the only thing to which he can cling. Logic will support him and bring him to safety.

'Here. Drink this.'

Her voice is a momentary surprise. For a while he had forgotten that she was still there. But she is kneeling, he sees now, beside him in the sandy shelter, holding out a flask with an open top.

'For dehydration,' she says as he catches the odd chemical scent. 'You've lost a lot of vital minerals. You don't need to give me that look. My medical scanner tells me you have. It doesn't lie.'

He opens his eyes a little wider, letting himself focus on her appearance.

'I wasn't aware of giving you any _look_,' he says.

He sits up a little and drinks some of the liquid. It is salty and sharp and metallic and his mouth revolts at the taste. But he can also taste that is contains precisely the compounds that he needs. He drinks it and it settles in his stomach, heavy and cool.

'The hormonal imbalance is levelling out,' she says in a quiet voice.

She does not sound as if she is thinking of the days and hours of heat and lust, of his moving hands and his hungry lips. She does not seem to be thinking of lying out on the sand under the moonless sky, nerveless with exhaustion. She sounds as if she is standing in the sickbay aboard ship, reading the chart of an anonymous patient and proclaiming him well.

'Christine,' he says, but he doesn't know what words to use to follow that one.

He is grateful, yes. Grateful and exhausted and confused. He is so tired. He has barely eaten despite her exhortations. He must have lost something like twelve pounds of weight. His cheeks and chin are rough with the stubble of an unshaven beard. His hair is tangled and filthy and his skin is covered in dust. His spine is a disjointed line of beads discarded on the floor. His legs are the broken, senseless legs of a doll dropped by a child. He is _so_ tired that he could fall into a grave and lie there without emotion as the earth was scooped in upon him. He would be grateful that he could rest, but nothing more.

'You don't have to say anything,' she says, breaking his silence.

She is not looking at him. Her eyes are red-rimmed and her hair loose and lank. Her clothing is dirty, her skin sunburnt to a rich brown. Her irides are blue and tired and focussed on the sand beside him. He sees her hands, still and loose at her sides. She looks as if she has let go of something precious and let it drift away on the tide.

'Christine,' he says again.

Logic tries to assert its dominance, but it is chased out by regret, love, pity, hopelessness. He doesn't know where to go from here. She is everything he could wish for, except Vulcan. She would accept him without question. She would stand beside him. She would understand. She is young enough still, and ripe and lean and tall. Her skin is firm and her hair is dark and her eyes are alive despite the exhaustion. She would wait for him to return from every duty mission and welcome him with upturned lips and open arms.

She would mourn for him if he were killed. She would sit beside his bed if he were injured beyond hope, and she would cry for him. If they served together their minds would always be twined, and when the ship was in danger he would be thinking of her, and when lives in sickbay were in danger she would be thinking of him. No man in love can work efficiently when the object of his desire is in danger.

There is no logic to a relationship on a starship. There is no way that it can work, no way that two people with their minds entwined can work safely. Neither is there logic to a relationship where the two halves are separated, where one is ever moving about the wandering stars and the other planet-bound or tied to another ship. There simply – is no logic.

He is glad he is not human, because he thinks that in his exhausted, worn-out, drained state that the sadness of that realisation would kill him.

He raises his hand to her and captures her fingers in his own. For once she feels warmer than he does.

'I cannot let this continue to happen,' he says quietly. 'I cannot use you like this.'

'You have never used me,' she says, and something in her voice sounds broken. 'Never.'

'There is only one logical course to take,' he says, his eyes focussed on the dark stone above him, neither seeing it nor blind to it. 'There is a place on Vulcan called Gol.'

'I know,' she says as if she is biting into a bitter pill. 'I know about Gol.'

'A master of the Kolinahr is not vulnerable to his – Time,' he says with difficulty. Even after all that has happened, still it is hard to voice it. Somehow intimacy upon intimacy does not compare to actually voice thoughts and feelings.

Her fingers are moving on his, soft and slow. He looks at her fingernails and sees that they are dirty and chipped. When they finally emerge out of the desert they will not look fit for civilisation.

In a very controlled voice, control almost worthy of a Vulcan, she says, 'You would not need to worry about your Time if you stayed with me.'

He swallows. His eyes close. He cannot look into her face. When he opens them he looks at the square of dazzling sunshine outside the shelter.

He gets to his feet and moves outside, and she follows him. He takes her to where the spring flows, where the trees grow rich and burdened with fruit and the heat of the sun is tempered by shade and a cooler breeze. He picks a fruit and gives it to her, and she holds it but does not lift it to her lips. She holds it like an infant, he thinks, like something that is so precious that she would never let it fall.

'Not everyone can achieve the Kolinahr,' he says in a slow voice. Their fingers are still tangled. He can feel her pulse through her fingertips. 'Not everyone has the discipline.'

'And if you can't?' she asks him. There is less control in her voice now. Something like a sob modifies her words.

He closes his eyes briefly, but keeps on walking under the trees, feeling the soft and shade-cooled sand moving between his toes, flattening against the soles of his feet. This, perhaps, is paradise, if paradise has ever existed. If there were a god for him to make bargains with, he would consider making one now. But there is no god. There is simply space, unending and unyielding, filled with countless miracles of science. There is simply that dark arch of sky and the stars within, and after some distance there are other planets with other beings looking up through the fragile bubble of atmosphere that holds them and constructing their own myths and questions about what may exist in the dark reaches of space.

'If I can't…' he echoes.

To follow the Kolinahr he will be required to give up those delicate, dangerous intricacies of space. To follow _her_ he will be required to give up the same. But the Kolinahr, at least, will give him the resources to accept both losses. There is no regret in the mind of the Adept. There is only peace and acceptance.

'I love you,' she says in a choked voice. 'I have always loved you.'

He stops walking. The effects of his Time must still be running in his veins. His throat feels hard and he cannot swallow. There is moisture in his eyes.

He turns to her and cups her cheek in his hand. She raises her face to him and he leans closer. The air between their lips is like water, thick and warm and so hard to pass through. But he moves forward and his lips touch hers and his fingertips wipe tears from her cheek. She tastes of fruit and warmth. He would believe in God and sell his soul to be human at this moment. But he chose his path long ago. It is so hard to step from a paved way and strike out into the wilderness.

He doesn't know how long he has been standing here, his lips against hers, his tongue stroking the insides of her mouth and his hands trying to touch her entire body. He has fallen into an oblivion that is softer and kinder than orgasm. He feels her hair and the beating of her heart under the shell of her ribs. He feels her skin and the warmth of her blood and hears her breaths coming short and shallow near his ear.

He gently lowers her to the ground and he strokes her body with the flatness of his palms and his searching fingers and he _feels_ her in a way he could not when his mind was inflamed with a hormonal desire. He nudges her legs apart and he touches her there and sinks himself into her, sinking his tongue into her mouth at the same time and feeling as if there are not two beings here, but one. This is it, he knows. This is the last time he will permit himself to feel in this way. This is the last time he will know such intimacy.

She is velvet and he is a sword slipping safely into its sheath. She is a harbour and he has come to rest. This moment is so, so _right_ that he thinks that the Adepts at Gol must be madmen or freaks. That thought is so fleeting that it is tossed into the wind before he can think any further. He will not think of them. He will think of nothing but the feeling of her around him and her warm human presence, of the delicate touch of her mind and the knowledge that she accepts him as a flower accepts a bee. He closes his eyes and thinks that even if the universe continues through infinity, there will be no time for him apart from this present moment when all the worlds are perfect and all the stars are aligned.

THE END


End file.
